Galaxy S8 owner “fixed” its most annoying misfeature

JC Torres

1 year ago

The Galaxy S8 was almost perfect. Its one glaring flaw was its fingerprint scanner. Never mind the off-center position that has resulted in many a smudge to the camera, the scanner, being really just a flat, non-tactile surface, was hard to locate with your finger. Owner Quinn Nelson managed to fix that and surround the sensor with a somewhat discrete perimeter around the sensor to make it easier to find. Amusingly, he had to break it before actually “fixing” it.

This isn’t a hack that most Galaxy S8 owners will actually take to remedy the situation. In fact, this was purely on accident. Nelson actually set out to do something completely different, which involved removing the Galaxy S8’s cover. In that process, however, he managed to accidentally ruin the gasket that fills the gap around the sensor to keep water out.

To fix that error, Nelson replaced it with his own waterproof adhesive. But since the material that Samsung used was made specifically for the Galaxy S8 and its fingerprint sensor, off the shelf materials don’t exactly match. The end result was that the fingerprint sensor was no longer flat on Galaxy S8’s back and a bit of material protrudes around it, giving it an easy to find border.

It’s not a perfect solution, of course. Now the sensor juts out from the back, even more than the barely protruding camera. This means that the Galaxy S8 won’t lie flat on a surface anymore. On the up side, it also means that the camera lens won’t directly make contact with a surface either.

The fingerprint scanner has been one of the most debated aspect of the Galaxy S8, and Samsung is showing no signs of changing course. Some might even see the Galaxy Note 8 as worse in that regard. But at least now Samsung has put the LED flash in between the sensor and the camera to hopefully lessen the amount of smudges you’d make.